The present invention relates to a take-up system for strip-form photographic material in which the photographic strip material can be wound up onto a take-up core of a strip material cartridge (film reel or cartridge or paper cartridge) that can be attached or affixed at the take-up side or the uncoiling side in the processing stations of a photographic processing system.
Photo labs that process certain types of exposed film materials, usually negative films in 135 format, in very large quantities are increasingly coming under the pressure of their customers who want their orders filled in ever shorter times. For this purpose, the individual processing steps, from introduction of the exposed film material and its development through preparation of the desired number of copies in the desired format, usually paper prints in 3".times.4.5" to 5".times.7.5" formats, to packaging of the film negatives and paper prints, are carried out with the help of various high-speed machines and sometimes still manually supported.
Above all, at the beginning and the end of the individual processing steps, the operating personnel is often still used to insert film or paper rolls into an automatic threader,for example, or to take coiled film or paper rolls from one station and transport them to the next, where they rearrange them for use again. The work speed required from the operating personnel is relatively high and is largely determined by the very high processing speeds of the individual processing stations. In addition to the high work speed, extreme precision and accuracy are demanded from the operating personnel to prevent faulty order processing or undesired down-time of the individual processing stations.
The operating personnel must make sure that the loose ends of the photographic strip material (film or paper strips) are not soiled, since such soiling could be passed on to the conveyance means in the individual processing stations. One must avoid accidentally triggering the stopping of the take-up core of a cartridge and turning it in the wrong direction, since in this case the strip material can be pulled into the cartridge and can only be pulled back out with difficulty. The operating personnel must also make sure that the front ends do not get caught and damaged, since this could lead to problems in threading the strip material, which in turn could lead to undesired down-time for the processing station or the entire processing system.
With modern photographic processing systems, there is a trend toward largely relieving the operating personnel from their intervening function. In particular, the photographic strip material, film or paper, is to be automatically transported between the individual processing stations and automatically threaded in, uncoiled and taken up again onto reels in the processing stations. In the process, there is the problem that the typical reels or cartridges are not designed for automatic grappling. The photographic strip material, film or paper, cannot be automatically grasped and threaded into the respective processing station. With most processing stations, the strip material can indeed be quasi-automatically taken up onto a reel or cartridge at the exit, but it is then not in a suitable form to be automatically grappled again and uncoiled at the next station.